June 12, 2019 — Ask Dave Hunter of Snow Island Oysters, grown in Quahog Bay, and he’ll tell you: the perfect oyster is 2 ½ to 3 inches long. That’s the length oyster dealers and customers are looking for, he said Monday.
“It’s, ‘Chew, chew, swallow,’” Hunter said.
“I usually tell the guys 2 ½ to 3 ½,” Ray Trombley, who buys American oysters at Casco Bay Shellfish in Brunswick, said Tuesday. “They’re not worth as much if they get any bigger. As a buyer, I like that size, and so does the market I sell to, and they sell to restaurants in Portland.”
But as of June 5, more than 200 of Maine’s smaller oyster farmers were temporarily out of business after PSP (paralytic shellfish poisoning) — a biotoxin known as red tide — was detected off Basin Point in Harpswell, the islands in Middle Bay, and Christmas Cove Landing in South Bristol, according to records from the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
State officials closed areas to oyster harvesting near the Bristol peninsula and, approximately, from Phippsburg to Cape Elizabeth.